


Five Jobs Tim Bayliss Never Had

by shell



Category: Hard Core Logo, Homicide: Life on the Street
Genre: 5 Things, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-10
Updated: 2006-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-02 05:31:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shell/pseuds/shell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The title pretty much says it all.</p><p>Contains brief mentions of violence</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Jobs Tim Bayliss Never Had

1\. Tim Bayliss was a great salesman. Sure, it took him a few months to settle in at his uncle's dealership, but once he got past the humiliation of having his first few deals be turned down by the finance people, he took to it like a duck to water. He could sell a convertible to someone moving to northern Maine, a minivan to a bachelor--maybe that major in drama helped, who knew. He won salesman of the month six months running, all in his first year, and he kept it up for the next couple years.

His fourth year at the dealership started out just as strong, but he slowed down after his father's funeral. His uncle let it go for a couple months--he still wasn't over losing his brother himself--but when the third month of slipping numbers, shoddy paperwork, and short hours was over, he called his son at law school and asked him if he knew what was going on with Tim.

Jim said he wasn't sure--the cousins weren't as close as they used to be. Then Kurt was killed, and Jim rushed home to Baltimore.

Jim and Teej got drunk that night. Tim was drunk again at the funeral, and there was something going on between him and George, but everyone ignored it politely. They couldn't ignore it anymore three days later, when Tim shot George and then himself.

2\. He was never sure it was what he really wanted to do, but once he gave up on the idea of becoming a cop, it made as much sense as anything else to do pre-med as a major. He did well on the MCATs, got into Hopkins, and spent his last summer before medical school working as a bartender. He planned on pediatrics until he did his rotation in the ED. It was right after his father died, but he didn't think that really had anything to do with his decision. The fact that Steven DaVinci was going for emergency medicine--now, _that_ affected his decision.

He and Steve broke up right after match day, but Tim stuck with the ED. He did his residency at Shock Trauma and wrangled it into a fellowship and eventually became an attending. He never really left Baltimore. It was okay, though--Baltimore was home, especially once he met Chris Rawls. Between Chris' schedule at the Zodiac and Tim's long hours at the hospital, some weeks it felt like they barely saw each other, but they still managed. It helped that they loved each other.

He saw a lot of cops in his line of work, cops questioning witnesses, arresting suspects right in the waiting room, that kind of thing. Every once in a while the cops were the patients, like when that detective came in with a stroke, his partner all worried. Turned out the same detectives investigated when Chris found Alan Costello's body in the dumpster. A couple years later, the situation was reversed--Pembleton was the one who was worried, because Eli Devilbliss was bleeding internally from a gunshot wound, and it didn't look good. Eli made it, though, and Tim and Chris visited him a couple times up in the ICU. Tim never saw Pembleton again after that first night; Eli didn't seem inclined to talk about it, so he never pressed the issue.

There wasn't much that shocked him anymore, but he was still shocked a couple years later when they arrested Eli for shooting that internet killer. He kept Chris up half the night, trying to reconcile the thoughtful detective he thought he'd known with someone who would kill another person. Chris said he just felt guilty he'd never followed up with his plan to invite Eli over to dinner once he got out of the hospital. Maybe Chris was right.

3\. New York was exciting, and he loved acting, but it wasn't like he was getting any jobs, so once his father got sick, he moved back to Maryland, staying on after the funeral. He went through a one year teacher certification program and found a job teaching drama and coaching basketball at Glen Burnie High.

Alice Griffin taught English at GBHS. He fell in love with her despite the fact that her favorite Shakespeare plays were _The Tempest_ and _King Lear_ instead of _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_. They married a year after he started teaching.

They had three kids: Jim, Emily, and Hannah. Tim loved them more each day, even as his love for their mother faded. Alice, for her part, never questioned Tim's occasional refusal to attend family gatherings--and he always wondered why she didn't, why she never asked him about the occasional nightmares that started the night she told him she was pregnant.

He knew there was something missing in his life; he knew what he'd given up when he'd moved back home and settled down. Sometimes Alice took the kids to go visit her folks in Florida, and when she did that, sometimes Tim went to the city, to some bar or club. One night he went to Floss and met a hustler named Peter Fields.

His last thoughts were of his children.

4\. Tim was working his way through law school as a bartender and sometime bouncer when he saw Hard Core Logo perform on their last tour. He was so fascinated by Joe Dick and Billy Tallent that he only noticed the fight starting in the back of the room when Joe pointed at it. He rushed in and took care of things, although it cost him a split lip and some bruises.

Tim never knew that Billy was staring at him the entire time he was breaking up the fight, that Billy thought of the tall, hot bouncer he'd seen that night when he was falling asleep after sucking Joe's cock. Still, Tim Bayliss had an epiphany that night, which was two weeks after his father's funeral.

Years later, Tim met Bill Boisy at one of those Hollywood fundraisers for AIDS research. Bill thought Tim looked vaguely familiar, but he never put the gay rights activist together with the bouncer, not even when Tim told him it was a Hard Core Logo concert that made him admit he was bisexual.

They had a brief, intense affair, but Bill was just a bit too fucked up for Tim to deal with, so he broke it off.

5\. The first time Tim Bayliss tried meditation was in the comparative religion course he took his sophomore year of college. He fell asleep.

The next year, his girlfriend gave him a copy of Shuryu Suzuki's _Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind_ for his birthday, and he started reading it one night because he didn't feel like working on his history paper. He and Cheryl broke up a month later, but by then he'd already become a vegetarian and tried meditation again. This time it stuck. That summer he bought a zafu and started sitting for half an hour every morning.

By the time he graduated, he was sitting for an hour twice a day, and he'd changed his mind about entering the police academy, because he wasn't sure you could be a cop and a Buddhist both. He wasn't sure what he was going to do instead, but he thought he'd start by going to a retreat. His cousin gave him a beater from his father's car dealership, and Tim drove across the country to the San Francisco Zen Center for what was supposed to be a weekend retreat. When the retreat ended, he asked if he could stay for another week or two, offering to work at the restaurant. Three months later, a committed zen slave, he asked to begin the process of ordination.

He went back to Baltimore for his father's funeral, then stayed with his cousin for a few weeks, sitting with his anger and trying to let it go. When he got back to San Francisco and realized what Roshi Baker was doing with some of his students, he left the Center and thought, briefly, of leaving the practice. He moved to upstate New York instead, and it was at Zen Mountain Monastery where he was ordained as Timothy Koshin (Shining Heart-Mind) Bayliss.

Timothy Koshin Roshi never wrote any best-sellers, and his poetry was never published by _Tricyle_ or anyone else, but he received the dharma transmission from John Daido Loori Roshi when he was in his early forties, about twenty years after he first read Suzuki's book, and for the eight years between Daido Roshi's death and his own, he was Abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery.


End file.
